Working Whilst Away From Home
As holidays approach I thought I'd share how I get things done while "AFK". I don't use a mobile phone (nor does my wife) and that's generally a good thing. Such devices aren't good at getting anything done, except nuisance and interruptions (like passive notifications). For me, borders aren't scary, so long as the devices at hand do not contain any data on them. I have to protect sources, so that's super-important to me. The data stays at home, then accessed over SSH (sometimes with applications relayed using X forwarding). Since I'm not in any social control media and I use a text editor (mostly Kate) to write articles, virtually any computer with a text editor can be used to compose articles 'offline'. A browser is seldom needed.
I don't use a VPS for IRC, but I do always run some IRC clients at home and can connect to them remotely. In case they crash, for whatever reason, it's possible to remotely start them again.
ssh -X roy@[home] "DISPLAY=:0 nohup [application]"
I don't like webmail. It's clunky and slow, plus it serves to fragment inboxes (unless some manual work is done or IMAP is used sparingly).
Suffice to say, with Wayland this approach would simply not work. Owing to us sticking to X(org) and its tools, there's very low chance of a system-wide crash... or the remote possibility of the PC losing power (the router/connection has been stable for years). Our 3 main laptops were last rebooted in 2023.
This means that being away does not cause anxiety over data security (I don't carry data with me) and does not require much change in workflows. However, being away means being away from keyboard ("AFK"), otherwise it's rather pointless.
Decades ago being away meant all sorts of problems associated with workflows and connectivity. If some remote machine is always connected and is always possible to connect to, that really solves most perils.
These methods won't work for everyone, but this is my personal story. █